Spaces of Danger: Culture and Power in the Everyday

By Heather Merrill, Lisa M. Hoffman, Katharyne Mitchell and 12 more

These twelve original essays by geographers and anthropologists offer a deep critical understanding of Allan Pred’s pathbreaking and eclectic cultural Marxist approach, with a focus on his concept of “situated ignorance”: the production and reproduction of power and inequality by regimes of truth through strategically deployed misinformation, diversions, and silences. As the essays expose the cultural and material circumstances in which situated ignorance persists, they also add a previously underexplored spatial dimension to Walter Benjamin’s idea of “moments of danger.”

The volume invokes the aftermath of the July 2011 attacks by far-right activist Anders Breivik in Norway, who ambushed a Labor Party youth gathering and bombed a government building, killing and injuring many. Breivik had publicly and forthrightly declared war against an array of liberal attitudes he saw threatening Western civilization. However, as politicians and journalists interpreted these events for mass consumption, a narrative quickly emerged that painted Breivik as a lone madman and steered the discourse away from analysis of the resurgent right-wing racisms and nationalisms in which he was immersed.

The Breivik case is merely one of the most visible recent examples, say editors Heather Merrill and Lisa Hoffman, of the unchallenged production of knowledge in the public sphere. In essays that range widely in topic and setting—for example, brownfield development in China, a Holocaust memorial in Germany, an art gallery exhibit in South Africa—this volume peels back layers of “situated practices and their associated meaning and power relations.” Spaces of Danger offers analytical and conceptual tools of a Predian approach to interrogate the taken-for-granted and make visible and legible that which is silenced.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Release date: Dec 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9780820348759

Katharyne Mitchell

Katharyne Mitchell is Dean of the Division of Social Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is author and editor of several books, including Practicising Public Scholarship (2008).

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Making Sense of Our Contemporary Moment of Danger

HEATHER MERRILL AND LISA M. HOFFMAN

What matters is not to know the world but to change it.

—FRANTZ FANON, Black Skin, White Masks

Inquiry into the current moment of danger calls for moving out of bounds, for undisciplined acts.

—ALLAN PRED, Out of Bounds and Undisciplined

On July 22, 2011, a tragedy struck Utoya Island in Norway that has traumatized young people, pained families, and challenged a nation. On that day a thirty-two-year-old far-right activist clothed as a police officer opened fire on a Labor Party youth camp, killing sixty-nine innocent people and maiming many more. The vast majority of the victims were between fourteen and nineteen years of age. Their attacker also placed bombs in a government building in Oslo, an action that killed eight and wounded at least 110 others. How can we make sense of this? How might public intellectuals shed light on such a tragedy?

In a 1,500-page manifesto in English posted on the Internet hours before Anders Breivik engaged in this massacre, he referred to himself as a Marxist hunter and declared preemptive war targeting Cultural Marxists who propagate a multiculturalist ideology to which he attributed the decay of Western European and American civilization and culture and the promotion of a pro-Islamic Eurabia. What needs to be understood about this situation is not only what the content of the killer’s easily downloadable manuscript reveals about far-right thinking but also how the significance of the event was concealed and silenced as it was interpreted for the public by journalists and political figures. As with the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing in the United States, the initial response was to blame Muslim fanaticism, but once it had become clear that the terrorism was homegrown, the dominant discursive (mis)rendering was that Breivik’s acts were simply the expressions of a deranged madman who had turned to violence of his own accord. This individual criminal narrative redirected public discussion of the killer away from the collective right-wing nationalism and localism, racism, and Islamophobia that have resurfaced and proliferated throughout Europe and the United States in the last decade. The regimes of truth and systems of power sustaining such dangers were silenced, and the focus was on a single social anomaly—the madman.

By characterizing Breivik as an evil aberration and abstracting his acts from the social and political context in which they took place, persuasive political arbiters and media reproduced what geographer Allan Pred referred to as situated ignorance, the production of fear-filled forms of situated knowledge . . . infused with distortions, misrepresentations, and disinformation, and otherwise largely comprised of gaping holes (2007, 364). The characterizations of Breivik initially as a Muslim terrorist and then as an individual madman silenced the connections between power and knowledge, dispossession and racism, violence and culture, preventing people from making sense of the events. These madman narratives distracted the public from examining the content of Breivik’s manifesto and the political logic of his acts, which were linked to a diffuse culture of hatred in Europe associated with an extended moment of danger of magnified capitalist modernity and the promotion of militarization.

Upon close examination from a critical perspective, Breivik’s position is not discontinuous with the growing size and confidence of the anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim Right as part of a strategy for national and European unification, what Bachmann and his colleagues term a broader European moment of ‘cultural crisis’ (2012, 192; see also Partridge, this volume). This tragedy, which will be memorialized by a piece titled Memory Wound in which a gap is cut through the peninsula to signify the symbolic wound to the nation,¹ signals a persistent moment of danger (Pred 2007, 364). In this moment of danger, the European public tends to acquiesce to the use of violence by accepting the racialized argument that the threat to the collective good is external and identified among a selected group of usual suspects (Arabs, Muslims, people of African descent, and their white political allies). Through this cultural logic or imaginative geography of securitization, an act of M(ass) D(istraction) and D(eception) is performed (Pred 2007, 366), (re-)producing the Other as an embodied, identifiable danger that belongs on the other side of the border and lacks any claim on national or European/North American empathies.

This volume, in contrast, takes the view that the tragedy in Scandinavia requires a decidedly different kind of analysis. The critical approach offered here, for instance, interrogates the very discourses proliferating as explanation, creating much more richly textured understandings of social and spatial transformations of the present, the discursive formations and situated practices to which they give rise. The ideas and perceptions of an international network of the far right expressed in Breivik’s manifesto and the production of knowledge by political and media figures in response to the events, this volume’s perspective suggests, are only the entry points to a critical understanding of the cultural and material practices that produce them. Moreover, making sense of this tragedy in fact requires drawing on just the sort of critical, cultural Marxist approach to the relationship between everyday practices, cultural politics, social hierarchies, and political economy that is so maligned not only by Breivik but also by a coterie of ideologues and leaders of right-wing social networks and hate groups in Europe and the United States referenced in Breivik’s manuscript, for instance, the Knights Templar, the English Defense League, the Counter Jihad Movement, the American Freedom Defense Initiative, and Stop Islamization of America. Yet while this volume draws on the cultural Marxist tradition, it does so through a broad transdisciplinary approach, offering analytical and conceptual tools to interrogate the taken-for-granted and to make visible and legible that which is silenced, providing deeper understandings of the forms of power shaping our lives.²

(Re)cognizing the Cultural Marxist Tradition

Cultural Marxism is invoked by far-right groups as the metaphor of a disease contracted by some sort of alien group of leftist radicals whose promotion of multicultural politics, political correctness, and deployment of critical theory is destroying traditional institutions, most notably, the family. This is of course a gross reduction of cultural Marxist critique, which has among other things given rise in recent years to nuanced analyses of the cultural and material history of labor struggles in response to the acquisition of land by large agribusinesses (Mitchell 1996), the emergent narratives and ways of seeing that efface the workings of capitalists’ interests and structures of power (Harvey 1989), the transformation of livelihoods and forms of knowledge in relation to development schemes and global economic restructuring (Katz 2004), imaginative human struggles over material and cultural conditions during moments of capitalist creative destruction (Pred and Watts 1992), the impact of political upheavals and global markets on women and family life, and the emergence via intensified travel, communication, and mass media of a mobile transnational public who represent the fluidity of capitalism (Ong 1987, 1999). Such explorations unfold in the present hypermodern moment, an extended moment of danger characterized by modernity magnified and accelerated, the shattering of everyday taken-for-granted sensibilities in relation to global processes of privatization and deregulation; the relative absence of critique (i.e., dissent); and the engineering of distractions, silences, and forms of collective amnesia that ignite historically sedimented fears, virulent expressions of nationalism, and acts of direct and indirect racist violence (Pred 2000, 2004, 2007).

In many ways cultural or neo-Marxist theory has informed scholarship across the social sciences and humanities for almost a century, first activated and developed by the Institut für Sozialforschung at the Goethe Universität in Frankfurt, Germany, known as the Frankfurt School, and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, England, known as the Birmingham School. One of the fascinating lines of thinking in this tradition is the positing of the autonomy of culture in response to a critique of economic determinism, along with the insistence that culture and ideology cannot be separated from social and material conditions and transformations. Critical theory from the Frankfurt School initially emerged in the 1920s as a response to frustration over the limited ability of historical materialism to make sense of the absence of critical consciousness among the working classes, and it interrogated the cultural components of histories framed by global political economic transitions. Antonio Gramsci, Walter Benjamin, Louis Althusser, and more recently Stuart Hall have shared the view that cultural forms emerged in specific historical situations to serve particular social and economic interests and functions while appearing as natural, and part of a taken-for-granted common sense, therefore often rendered invisible and eluding incisive criticism. They viewed culture as a mode of ideological reproduction and hegemony as well as a potential form of resistance and counter-hegemony in capitalist society. These theorists have shaped many subsequent conversations by examining the state of play between the economic and the cultural and developing rich theories of hegemony, ideology, and historical and cultural critique.

Walter Benjamin was an especially innovative critical-cultural Marxist scholar whose writings prefigured more recent concerns in the humanities and social sciences with the fetishism of commodification and the proliferation of images in an era of global post-Fordist capitalism. Benjamin created a unique approach to cultural history by focusing on subjectivities and everyday practices to understand the continual flux and turbulence of experience in urban industrialized societies. Building on this tradition, a central concern of the chapters in this volume is to approach the production and reproduction of power and inequality by examining strategically deployed misinformation, diversions, and silences instantiated in practices and subjective reworkings.

It is also from Benjamin’s philosophy of history that we derive and employ the notion of moments of danger in this volume. The concept offers us an analytical and political stance that refuses to repress critique and turns away from simplified clear-cut answers, such as explaining the tragedy in Norway as the work of a madman. Rather, embracing this Benjaminian perspective compels us to question our everyday realities and to challenge the status quo. As he writes in Theses on the Philosophy of History, The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism ([1968] 2007, 257). This perspective actively resists a linear and additive approach to history, instead offering a more revolutionary and more ‘messianic’ orientation to temporality that can lead us not only to understand how collective and personal amnesia is (re)produced but also to identify forms of power shaping our lives (Mitchell, this volume).

Also framing the chapters is the work of geographer Allan Pred, who drew inspiration from these cultural Marxist traditions and especially from Walter Benjamin, while highlighting the spatial situatedness of these dangers. Pred refused to collapse the complexity of place and subject making into any easy frameworks, instead developing an eclectic approach, or what Katharyne Mitchell (this volume) calls an idiosyncratic form of cultural Marxism that emphasizes the simultaneity of capitalist disjunctures, cultural formations, quotidian practices, and forms of power in the making of histories and geographies (see also Watts, this volume). Refusing to be confined to disciplinary boundaries, Pred enacted a transdisciplinary approach that drew on Marxist, feminist, and post-structuralist ideas, offering a geography that is never only about physical spaces (although these matter greatly) but, fundamentally, about the emerging contours of power shaped by human decision and institutional agency (Pred 1985: 2000) (in Ong 2008, 117). He wrote of the highly differentiated and hierarchical spaces and practices of hypermodern capitalism through which societies make particular things visible, while concealing and silencing others. Pred also used Benjamin’s work to interrogate the ways in which the past is discarded and repressed yet repeated in unreconciled constellations in the present (see the essays of Olsson, Postero, Partridge, Gregory, and Katz in this volume).

Pred also employed Benjamin’s technique of montage as a method of opening up the possibility of a different recognition of the interweavings of modern politics, economy, and culture. Montage, for Pred, was a strategy for exposing the radical heterogeneity, heteroglossia, and multivocality of everyday life, juxtaposing art and society in order to bring alive multiple ways of knowing and sets of meaning, to allow differently situated voices to be heard, to speak to (or past) each other—as well as to the contexts from which they emerge—and to which they contribute (Pred 1995b, 25). Pred’s textual experimentations—his use of montage, multiplicity, and ambiguity—was intended, then, to contest and undermine linear and authoritarian approaches to social analysis (and history) that merely reproduced taken-for-granted forms of knowledge and power (Katz, this volume).

Pred’s pathbreaking work was fundamentally focused on re-cognizing the taken-for-granted knowledge employed in popular discourse and situated practices, as well as among social analysts. In his eclectic cultural marxism,³ he approached social analysis with a philosophical perspective focused on how ontologies were made through geographically situated practices that could not be understood through unattached categories of culture or economy. Highlighting how his work brought together trends in critical theory that were often isolated, this volume aims to connect disciplinary conversations that have tended to be segregated. Pred, for instance, radically interrogated our popular and scholarly uses of everyday knowledge of self and other, male and female, here and there, suggesting that employing habitual either/or categories rendered social complexity impermeable to us (see Olsson and Merrill in this volume). The paths of life (material and cultural), Pred argued, are differentiated by relations of power such as gender, class, and the social division of labor, and by race. Situated practices, Pred insisted, inscribe the body and mind with meanings that may or may not diverge from the dominant discourse and basis of knowing, as places cannot exist without participating individuals. Suggesting that the categories we use, as in the Breivik tragedy, particularly those that are binarist, define the world in ways that erect barriers and perpetuate epistemic violence, he asked, How are we to inquire into the world and re-present it without self-consciously selecting social (cultural) ontological categories that strive to redraw reigning maps of meaning? (1995a, 1069). He argued that if we use our habitual binarist categories and forms of explanation, social and cultural complexity is invisible to us. Where, he asks, are those phenomena subject to social inquiry that in act-uality are boundary confined? (1995a, 1066).

In his later work (starting in the 1990s), Pred approached the study of social life as an extended moment of danger fueled by a magnified capitalist modernity, and sped up by the circumstances associated with urban and socially engineered industrial and postindustrial worlds, politically volatile, and tumultuous, producing what some term precarity (see Muehlebach 2013), and others have noted as a memory crisis (see Landzelius 2009). He sought to make sense of how this danger captured experiences, sensibilities, tastes, and norms that were transformed along with capitalism, and how this extended moment of crisis had ignited, particularly in Europe and the United States, heightened fears and feelings of insecurity, new social tensions, and what he would describe as a sense of profound despair and even rage. He did this in studies of situated, everyday practices and the production of racisms, collective amnesia, and state terrorism (Pred 1995b, 2000, 2004; Gregory and Pred 2007). These conditions of capitalist hypermodernity, Pred suggested, bred experiences that were culturally and politically reworked into expressions of racism, into expressions that allow historically sedimented or latent forms of racism to resurface in new guises (2000, 10; also Partridge, Hart, Postero, and Merrill in this volume). As in Oklahoma in 1995 and Norway in 2011, this is not only a pressing issue but a matter of life and death, making it essential for critical analyses such as those offered in this volume to be engaged, published, and circulated. The past may be reworked in the present in ways that are dangerous to genuine democracy as subjectivity is informed by a nexus of power relations, visible and invisible geographies that deafen and blind many to the suffering of those most at risk or already multiply displaced. The current moment of danger is intensified then by misguided attention to explanations that disarm, paralyze, and deflect attention away from those processes responsible for the insecurities, injustices, anxieties, and dissatisfactions (Pred 1995a, 1085).

The chapters in this volume highlight taken-for-granted situated ignorances and embrace the concept of a moment of danger to invoke simultaneously visible and invisible geographies of power. As a helpful conceptual tool for critical analysis of the contemporary, this approach also provides a useful pivot as the chapters encounter diverse themes of language, history, culture, political economy, subjectivity, and material social and spatial practices at multiple scales. In highlighting culture and power, we intend to underscore the production of spaces, subjects, and inequalities—material, cultural, and symbolic—through transdisciplinary dialogue, especially that of anthropology and geography, and to stretch our approaches to making sense of power. In exploring various contours of the present moment of danger and discussing the social theoretical optics needed to apprehend the complexity of contemporary social forms and practices, the contributors draw on cultural Marxist traditions, as well as an expanded field of feminist, postcolonial, post-structuralist, and critical race scholarship. By underscoring the geographical tradition in interrogating power, this volume also recognizes the transdisciplinarity of geography more specifically (Gilmore 2005) and the necessity of working across disciplines to make sense of the complexity of global processes, the persistence of new iterations of everyday racism, anti-immigration sentiments and practices, warfare, feminist and counterhegemonic politics, social movements, environmental degradation, the postcolonial state, and other pressing issues of a highly complex present.

Thus this transdisciplinary volume includes work by both geographers and anthropologists in particular, a partnership, nourished at the University of California, Berkeley and elsewhere, that has spawned some of the richest and most innovative social theoretical directions of the day (Pred, Watts, Harvey, Katz, Ong, Rabinow, Pratt, McDowell, Nast, Gregory, Smith, Gilmore, Twine). Allan Pred, a cornerstone of those partnerships and what may be called the Berkeley School of geography, had a great deal to say about geographies of power and over the course of his years of scholarship generated an innovative approach capable of capturing the highly complex interplay of body and practice, spatiality and materiality, biography, culture, and meaning at a wide range of interconnected scales. Through pioneering co-teaching, Allan Pred and Paul Rabinow also forged significant links between anthropology and geography at Berkeley, shaping how many students were trained to think about space, subjects, and power. This innovative approach, what we term here a "Predian" perspective, is rooted in geography yet highly transdisciplinary in its scope, refusing to be confined by boundaries or predetermined by narratives. A Predian analytic is focused on re-presenting the present and its modern antecedents and making intelligible the ways in which power gains its meanings and traction as histories are produced through actual bodily engagement in locally situated practices embedded in hubs of material and relational flows intersecting multiple scales. It is an eclectic cultural marxist approach and decidedly distinct from popular narratives of the tragedy in Norway.

A Predian perspective is attentive to the ways in which culture and hegemony are lived in systems of values and meanings, constituted and constitutive in part through exposure to mass media images, political narratives, and ways of seeing and being seen. In this perspective one’s biography resonates with the conditions of one’s life, so that human geography and social and economic histories cannot be pried apart, or as Pred put it, The construction of human geographies and the formation of biographies are enwrapped in one another and inseparable from the dialectical intertwinings of human practice, power relations, and consciousness (1990, xv). But consciousness is also importantly given expression in language, which imposes culturally arbitrary classifications of the world that become second nature (see Olsson, this volume). Perceptions of the world are classified and differentiated in languages that are living processes in the everyday, part of ineluctably historical situated practices always in a state of becoming. In other words, language cannot be separated from the temporally and spatially specific conditions under which people live, for it (re) produces norms and truths both visible and invisible, shaping what we know and who we are. The exercise of power on the ground requires the absorption of language, including a consistent recognition of the gender-, age-, class-, or group-directed terms and phrases indicating who may or may not do what, when, and where (Pred 1990, 3). There are always multiple and frequently discordant languages and heteroglossia, and these have to be measured against ideals of the correct language (Merrill, this volume). Situated and place-based analysis is needed to interrogate these processes, and it is significant that Pred’s own work was located in Sweden, where he drew on place-based materials at a remove from the standard Anglocentric analytic that has influenced so much of contemporary social theory.

We suggest in this volume that present dangers revealed in conjunctures like the shocking devastation in Norway are made intelligible through a Predian perspective that sees the past not as once upon a time or the way it really was, but instead when the then (and There) and the (Here and) Now come together into a constellation like a flash of lightning, what in Benjamin’s words is to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger ([1968] 2007, 255). Making sense of the tragedy in Norway requires a more situated approach, placing it in the context of the legacy of the European right wing, for Breivik’s targeting of Norway’s social democrats is in line with the general fascist paranoia that sees ‘cultural Marxism’ across the progressive political spectrum (Bhattacharyya 2011). His perceptions and ideas resonate with and incite an international network of contacts that take as their principal targets Muslims, multiculturalism, and cultural Marxists and whose ideas have become diffuse.

This volume argues that we need an uncompromisingly critical understanding of spatiality that calls on theories of power and culture developed by cultural Marxists like Walter Benjamin, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, and others, but that extends them by insisting on the scrutiny of situated practices and their attendant meanings and power relations in a Predian perspective that is transdisciplinary and eclectic in its analytic. It is a tall order to move between material social practices, perceptions, biographies, and representations requiring complex geographical and anthropological sensibilities, but this is necessary if we are to make sense of the social and spatial transformations of the present moment and identify what is at stake in them. How else are we to understand such issues confronting us as the rise of new forms of inequality, or power, and their imbrications with race and gender (see Hart, Postero, Partridge, and Merrill in this volume)? How the social and political geographies of postcolonial nations are formed around oil and an oil complex (see Watts, this volume)? The meanings of proxy wars and drone attacks (see Gregory, this volume)? The social effects of toxins in the form of brownfield development (see Krupar, this volume)? The meaning of Europe today (see Merrill and Partridge, this volume)? The framing of innovation and competition (see Walker, this volume)? Shifting identities and spatialities (see Mitchell, Katz, and Merrill, this volume)? This extended moment of danger, when capitalist modernity is accelerated and everyday taken-for-granted(s) are repeatedly shattered, when there is crisis of collective identity, and a loss of faith in political leadership? A time when people are driven individually and collectively to wonder, What in the world is going on here? Where in the world am I, are we? Who in the world am I, are we? (Pred 1995b), when it seems that things are falling apart, again (Fortun 2012, 449), and indeed, when even the concept of crisis reigns as a defining paradigm (see Roitman 2014)? These are some very challenging problems to unravel.

The authors of these chapters all follow the pathways of thought carved out in the work of this highly innovative thinker Allan Pred, whose theoretically rich critical interrogations and re-presentations of hypermodernity are rooted in an insistence on historically, geographically situated practices. Each scholar struggles with the nucleus of theoretical notions generated by him to pursue pressing questions of his or her own distinctive research endeavors. The chapters follow various Predian theoretical threads that seem vast but are linked through an insistent critique of that which goes unnoticed such as the way the past and the present enfold within one another, everyday life and spectacular capitalism, biography and the making of identities and places through lived geographies and bodily engagements in locally situated practices, the relationship between language, spatiality and power, capitalist space economies, the culture and materiality of the state, and the production and contestation of racialized collective identities.

Through the innovative work presented in this volume, we hope to make accessible significant new research that is of its very nature transdisciplinary. The volume also argues that Allan Pred’s work offers in a compellingly unique way new paths for critical scholars to understand and address contemporary reconfigurations of power, place, subjectivity, and economy. The essays are clustered around two central themes, one surrounding patterns of contemporary Western everyday racisms, and another that addresses social and economic issues. All the authors peel back layers of situated practices and their associated meaning and power relations in order to demonstrate the making of subjectivities in the past and the present, and the dangers of silencing and forms of collective deception. This work resonates widely with interest across the academy, and we hope it will build bridges to new scholarship that may be inspired by the novel directions initiated here by those compelled to go beyond the confines of their disciplines to test theoretical frontiers yet unexplored.

The volume is divided into five parts that examine and expand on themes developed in Pred’s writings: critical spatiality; situated practices; the urban and the spectacular; historical geographies of the present; and situated biographies.

Part 1. Critical Spatiality

Questions of spatiality in critical social theory are taken up in two chapters by Katharyne Mitchell and Gunnar Olsson. As noted previously, early critical Marxist theorists posited the autonomy of culture in response to economic determinism and yet insisted that culture and ideology operate in unison with social and material conditions. Gramsci and Althusser, for instance, examined the state of play between the economic and the cultural, leaning toward the economic as determinate in the first instance, while foregrounding the materiality and agency of cultural meanings and representations. These theorists, including Walter Benjamin, tended to be preoccupied with questions of how capitalist modernity affect and are affected by time, focusing little direct attention on space as more than a receptacle.

Critical and feminist geographers have argued that space is an agent in social and economic transformation, and this crucial understanding is taken up by Katharyne Mitchell, who underscores the importance of attention to spatiality in a Predian perspective. Through an exploration of Walter Benjamin’s ruminations on potentially revolutionary or messianic time, Mitchell notes how Pred moved these ideas into new configurations of possibility with the addition of spatially situated practices and subjectivities. The attention to situated subjectivities and politics offers social scientists a way to probe the taken-for-granted and the past for critical analysis and transformative potentiality. Mitchell turns this concern to our current moment of danger, the here and now, through an engagement with Bernard Stiegler and the implications of consumer capitalism, the extensive technologization of life, and the constitution of collective memory for generations to come.

Also discussing the kinds of politics that emerge from critical spatialities, but through a distinctive angle, Gunnar Olsson adopts a Predian approach to the National Historic Museum of Stockholm to uncover the hidden relations of power under the glass cases of a traveling show, in which race, power, and the inchoate fringe of language and visual culture transform the taken-for-granted into evidence of what lies just below the skin. Olsson explores what Pred might have called visible forms and invisible meanings, and the central thematic articulation of power and language deeply integrated in the Western museum culture. Through the examination of the grotesque and the taken-for-granted in Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas, Olsson explores the very nature of visual communication, contrasting the language of images to the constraints of creative expression and at times arbitrary limitations placed on language.

Part 2. Situated Practices

Interrogating the geographic, cultural, and historical situatedness of power relations, identities, politics, and regimes of truth is taken up by Gillian Hart, Heather Merrill, and Damani Partridge. A great deal of interdisciplinary interest has been addressed to practice since the appearance of Pierre Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice in the late 1970s. Bourdieu applied a neo-Marxist perspective to develop a theory of the production and reproduction of taken-for-granted social and cultural structures and symbolic systems through embodied, material practices. This concern with the way subjectivity is formed through systems of knowledge as they are produced and practiced in daily life was also central to Michel Foucault’s analytic of power and to a theory applied to the spaces of everyday urban life by Michel de Certeau. Drawing on all these perspectives along with Walter Benjamin’s insights on the production of modern urban life, Allan Pred advanced a geographical concept of practices as situated in social and economic history. This is a highly dynamic conception of space and society as produced through temporally specific practices, forms of knowledge, and individual biographies.

In her essay, Gillian Hart employs a Predian approach to the intersection of culture and materiality to explore the production of nationalism and the legitimacy of the state in post-apartheid South Africa as it intersects race and sexuality. Her examination of the controversies around Brett Murray’s The Spear, a painting of President Zuma, reveal an open critique of racialized masculinity and a hidden appeal to hypermasculinity that shields collaboration with global, neoliberal capital. The controversies surrounding The Spear serve as a point of departure for Hart’s examination of the broader political stakes of a Predian understanding.

While Hart takes up the direct employment of racial discourse as a form of state legitimization, Heather Merrill and Damani Partridge interrogate the silences surrounding the taken-for-grantedness of racial hegemony in contemporary Europe. The tensions and conflicts around social and cultural diversity are, as we have discussed, a pressing issue in Europe and globally. Heather Merrill, whose essay was the springboard for this volume, deploys Pred’s concept of situated practices and the critique of binarist categories along with critical race and feminist theory to explore how situated practices inscribe the body and mind with taken-for-granted meanings about race and belonging that do not diverge from the dominant discourse, even in counterhegemonic or ostensibly alternative feminist and intercultural sites. Through the concept of situated intersectionality, Merrill discusses the emergence of overlapping multicultural and feminist spaces in Italy and the politics of antiblackness, highlighting the invisibility of multilocal identity for migrants of African origin.

In his essay, Damani Partridge explores the production and contestation of space by migrant youth in Germany. Partridge adopts an unconventional approach derived from Pred’s writings to examine the power constellations and subjectivities that are emerging as Europe is reconstituted. He examines how the monumentalization of the past via Holocaust memorials in Germany may serve to silence links between past genocides and persistent iterations of racism, creating new specters of exclusion that posit migrant youth as the primary purveyors of anti-Semitism. The past, he suggests, is being reworked in contemporary Europe as a kind of blank slate on which German and European interests can be written, but a Predian analytic both refuses the lack of critique and the situated ignorance of contemporary racisms.

Part 3. The Urban and the Spectacular

In urban studies, a great deal of attention has been given to the relationship between an increased mobility of capital and spatial and social transformations in cities. Debates about place wars and interurban competition, globalization and potential cultural homogenization, economic concentrations and the production of global cities, and innovation and creativity have dominated in recent decades. These studies have raised questions about the relationship between capitalism and spatial transformation, the emergence of subjects in relation to creative and innovative cities, and what in his early work Allan Pred termed the enormously complex links between behavior and economic-geographic phenomena (1967, 64). In his essay, Richard Walker provides a cautionary tale about the more popular urban economic models by returning to Pred’s early work and its contributions to our understanding of flows/ networks; cities as chief economic nodes; and city systems as containing cities of all sizes. Significantly, Pred drew upon Keynes and Myrdal in his analysis of the long-term benefits or threshold effects of agglomerations, particularly for what is termed innovation, leading to a critique of the innovation diffusion perspective. Walker’s essay thus underscores earlier manifestations of an eclectic Predian cultural marxism that insists on the role of cultural systems through information flows; accounts for spatial inequalities of labor and capital; and approaches history not as a progressive chronology but rather as a source of understanding, critique, and inspiration.

The complexities of urban spatial economies may also be analyzed through the great world expositions and the centrality of spectacle to such urban events. From the dawn of these spectacular exhibits in the nineteenth century, the peculiar marriage of representations, and the sale of various and sundry items including industrial know-how and consumer goods from beer to candy, the infusion of national identity began to be projected through narrative and image. Converging with the moment of European expansionism, the exposition cycle displayed evidence of conquest with the erection of entire re-creations of African villages and in North America the posing of well-known recently vanquished Native American figures to demonstrate the power of the West and its great civilization (see also Olsson, this volume). That which was represented took place in lieu of actual villages and the lives of distant peoples elsewhere; rather than experiencing and acknowledging the West’s indebtedness to other cultures, one consumed distorted representations that for the price of admission could stand in for the real. But the representations began to infuse every aspect of social life, for as Guy Debord notes the spectacle is the moment when the commodity has attained the ‘total occupation’ of social life—a world in which one sees only the commodity (cited in Pred 2000).

While spectacle is also taken up by Michael Watts in the next part, here Shiloh Krupar examines the spectacular production of a futuristic urban world in the Shanghai world exhibition of 2010 through an analysis of what she calls soil hermeneutics and the dangers of sustainable spectacle. Krupar considers the particularities of a developing country hosting a world exhibition on sustainable urban development through a Predian approach intersected by a Foucauldian analytics of power. Explicitly resisting an easy critique of the expo as greenwashing that requires a split between the material and discursive dimensions of the expo, Krupar instead examines it as a governing arrangement that produces territories (brownfields, eco-cities), subjects (crowds), and ways of knowing (contamination, waste, human use). Moreover, she cautions us that sustainable spectacle not only produces dangers both now and in the future, but it also forestalls ethical consideration of the way the past persists in conditioning the complex social-ecological relations at present.

Part 4. Historical Geographies of the Present

Another key insight of Walter Benjamin that was taken up by Pred and is engaged by the three authors in this section is that modern historical time does not progress with a linear systematicity. Rather Pred advanced a vision of spatialized time in an effort to demythologize taken-for-granted perceptions and assumptions. Deploying this vision as well as Benjamin’s montage method, Allan Pred re-presented the present and its modern antecedents, furthering a dynamic and dialectical rendering of history not as a continuum out of the past and impelled by progress into the future but as instead apprehended from our vantage point in the present as ruptured moments that take on significance because of their relationship to the present (Susan Willis cited in Pred 1995b, 23; also Mitchell, this volume). In this conception, the present (hyper)modern moment repeats in reworked forms the nightmares of the past haunting the living.

In his essay, Michael Watts examines two insurgencies and their claims on belonging in Nigeria. Building on Pred’s penchant for historical detail, the deep grammar of places and place making, and cultural struggles of hypermodernity, Watts considers both an Islamic-oriented movement and a resource-oriented movement to argue that these insurgencies represent a state of emergency that questions the very existence of an entity called Nigeria. Both movements build on collective memories, are articulated with global capitalist resource extraction (i.e., oil), and are legible to disenfranchised youth as cultural struggles over belonging.

Attention to the trialectical tensions between situated practices, meanings, and power relations is also examined by Nancy Postero in her discussion of a historically and geographically contingent progressive extractivism and its contestation by indigenous peoples in Bolivia. Advancing Pred’s theoretical framework of cultural articulation, Postero focuses on the ways that Evo Morales’s Left government is a part of the reworking of race and racism as capitalism undergoes yet another transition in the contemporary era. As Morales aimed to build a plurinational Bolivia that was decisively post-neoliberal, the project not only produced racist reactions from white-mestizo elite but also accusations of racism against Morales himself from indigenous communities sacrificed to the extractivist development model. In this moment of danger, people drew on legible cultural materials to make sense of the political and economic restructuring they experienced, reproducing and reconfiguring racisms.

Derek Gregory’s examination of the genealogy and geography of the drone as a technology of war reveals an enduring sameness and also some compelling differences in the conduct of later modern warfare. Targeted killings from the sky have a long history, but drones represent the enlistment of new photo-cartographic imaginaries, technologies of vision that serve even more dehumanized methods of military violence. As killings take place from ever-increasing distances and crews survey targets without being seen, sometimes for months, troubling contradictions between heightened detachment and invasive, voyeuristic intimacy emerge. As the risks of warfare are transferred to overseas populations and the locus of warfare is wherever an individual enemy prey happens to be living, the drone has become a vector of the current empire. And yet critical focus is overwhelmingly on the legal ramifications of these actions instead of the way in which this technology of war transforms other lifeworlds into deathworlds.

Part 5. Biographical Montage of the Present

In the final part of this volume, Cindi Katz employs a Predian and Benjaminian method of using montage to explore the imbrications of history and geography through three Bronx childhoods intertwined in time and space. Her chapter offers an innovative method for exploring topographical consciousness, or how biography is shaped through the intertwining of memory and place. Walking through a Bronx neighborhood and talking about what was once there, Katz suggests a methodology for re-cognizing time spaces, revealing new constellations and ways of thinking about present moments of danger.

This volume offers a groundbreaking collection of essays that propel into the future an expanded and enriched Predian perspective. Written by students and colleagues influenced by Allan Pred through their time at UC Berkeley and/or through close collegial relationships with Pred, the volume speaks to his pre-science in realizing the need for transdisciplinary thinking in order to make sense of the present. Pred spent his prolific career at Berkeley, where he played a pivotal guiding role as a central luminary of the Berkeley School, publishing twenty-two books and countless articles, mentoring junior faculty, leading the geography department as chair, and training graduate students across campus. Through his complex interpolations via ethnography into the simultaneities of society and space, language and power, history and practice, culture and materiality, Pred addressed problems in social theory that have preoccupied scholars in the humanities and social sciences for decades, providing new guideposts. His interventions, as Michael Watts has suggested, seem to throw down a theoretical gauntlet, putting into question the established orthodoxies (Watts 2010). By bringing together work influenced by Pred, this volume draws together various strands of thinking in social theory that have tended to be separated or ignored. Pred was ahead of others in his expansiveness and disregard of disciplinary gatekeeping